JOYCE CAROL OATES
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his wife yet, they weren't married yet, just out on the beach for an
afternoon, rock music on the transistor, his buddies and their girl–
friends somewhere close by, beer in the cooler but the ice was melt–
ing, the sun was getting too hot or maybe wasn't hot enough, the sky
was getting mottled, it looked like rain maybe, the sky bruising up to
rain, except the wind was so rough it might blow the rain away: and
there was Marian Boci looking at him, coming on to him, out here
with all these people around, he knew what she was thinking and she
knew he knew, he'd get hard just with staring at her, or not even star–
ing at her but thinking about her, Marian Boci sticking her tongue
in his mouth like it was a joke or a trick, giggling and shoving at
him, drunk, or pretending to be drunk, all the guys thought she was
just great, all the guys envied Harvey Kubeck and he said, Yeh you
better believe it, Marian's hot .
He'd thought too, off and on before they were married, before
things got straightened out between them and she was still going
around with other guys, he'd thought something might happen, some–
thing terrible but necessary, one night he'd lose control and drive his
car into a bridge railing or something, Marian screaming next to
him, or worse yet he'd just kill her: strangle her: he thought about it
a lot.
There was an older guy who'd doused his girl with gasoline and
lit a match to her, then doused himself and did the same thing - and
Harvey thought about doing that too with Marian, not all the time
but sometimes, when they quarreled or she wasn't talking to him on
the telephone or he heard about her going out with another guy, it
wasn't a serious thought like the other, and nothing came of any of
it, she saw things his way eventually, she understood they were meant
for each other and that was that.
What stayed with him from the Cohasset Bay beach, what really
got to him, was the sand sculptures Paulie and Ben and some other
little kids made. He hadn't even been paying all that much attention
then Paulie led him over, and here was this fish, they said it was a
dolphin, maybe five feet long, one foot high, the goddamndest life–
like thing, with fins and gills and eyes and a mouth, and all around it
they'd made little hard-packed things of sand from turning sand pails
upside down, it just hit Harvey that this was a work of art, he got the
camera and took some pictures, the kids clowning around but really
proud, Paulie's daddy looming over them.
